I spent forty years climbing ladders that led to nowhere special. The view from the top? Same sky as everywhere else. These weren't bitter people who'd failed professionally. The group included a former Fortune 500 executive, a surgeon, and a woman who'd built a successful retail chain from scratch. They'd "made it" by every conventional measure. Yet each one said they'd spent too much time treating their career like it was their identity.
Getting that perfect work-life balance is important for people. They believe it will reduce stress. The truth is: it won't. Stress has nothing to do with this. There is an illusion that these two worlds, business and personal, are separate. But they aren't. You can't separate work from life. Know why? Every single business is a personal life. You don't stop being human the moment you step into your office.
With the open concept, there was no separation from the work and home setup. Because of this, I tried to make them flow seamlessly instead of competing with each other. It can be hard to have a 'shut off' from work with a layout like this, so I leaned into the existing built-in storage the space had and put on display the aspects of my career that provide inspiration instead of stress,
The other morning, I was on a Zoom call with a CEO, trying to sound composed, when my four-year-old burst into the room demanding to know where her princess dress was. I glanced down at my to-do list - which never seems to get shorter - and noticed I still needed to book a trip to San Francisco. In that moment, surrounded by chaos, I thought: I write a column called The Long Game.
Have you ever watched someone work and thought, "That's not the way I would do it"? It's natural to feel defensive about your own work habits. If you didn't think they were effective, you probably wouldn't engage in them. But, in our research, we find that it's exactly this kind of thinking that gets leaders in trouble. There are many different ways to go about completing the same task or solving the same problem.